Rockwell didn't know the young men on the gate that afternoon, but they apparently knew him. One of them nodded at him, called him "Brother," while the other opened up the gate, then closed it after him. Rockwell passed through the entryway, then turned left toward the staircase leading to the second floor and the governor's office.
Governor Young had a corner space upstairs, windows in two of his walls facing out over Main Street and South Temple. His office door was labeled with a brass plaque reading "PRESIDENT," a reference to his office in the church since Christmas 1847, though he'd also served as governor of Utah Territory for the past two years and some-odd days. Why advertise the lower rank, when it was known to everyone within five hundred miles already?
Rockwell knocked and waited, feeling suddenly self-conscious, as he always did before a meeting with the man thousands called an American Moses. There was no receptionist to meet him, just a booming call of "Enter!" from within, and Rockwell did as he was told.
Brigham Young was fifty-one years old, three or four inches shorter than Rockwell, but still an imposing figure. He was broad of chest and shoulder in his black frock coat and matching trousers, clean shaven, with dark hair parted on the left, long enough to cover his ears and his collar in back. Blue, almond-shaped eyes never left Rockwell's face as he closed the office door behind him, moving to stand before Young.
"Your quest was successful?" the governor asked him.
"It was, sir."
"Bad business. We cannot bear killers among us."
It wasn't a question, so Rockwell stood silent.
"Please sit, Brother Rockwell."
A chair was waiting for him, planted in front of the governor's large, hand-hewn desk. Rockwell waited for Young to assume his own seat, then sat. The desktop lay between them, polished to a glossy shine, with two neat stacks of paper separated by a foot or so of empty space where Young folded his hands.
"You are familiar with the settlement called Tartarus?"
"A mining town," said Rockwell. "On the east side of the Independence Range."
"Correct. And with the colony of Saints residing there?"
"Yes, sir." That group included Rockwell's nephew, Lehi, with some others and their wives. "They're digging silver."
"Which is vital to our territory, and of no small value in our present difficulty with the Gentiles."
Once again, no response called for.
"Going back four months or so," the governor continued, "we have had reports of conflict in the Tartarus community, between our kinsmen and the local nonbelievers."
"Ah." The sound escaped, and then it was too late for Rockwell to retrieve it.
"Now," said Young, "we've lost communication altogether. I dispatched a man two weeks ago, to make a personal investigation and report his findings. It appears that he has fallen off the earth, as well."
Rockwell made hasty calculations in his head. Call it a hundred and ten miles one-way, to Tartarus, from Salt Lake City. A determined rider on a good horse could cover that distance in—what? Three days? Say a week for the round trip, with plenty of time left to spy out the landscape.
"Foul play?" Rockwell offered.
"I fear so." The governor half-turned to stare through a window at darkening sky. "I need to know what's happened, Brother Rockwell. You will go to Tartarus on my behalf. Discover the solution to this riddle."
"And?"
"And take whatever action you deem necessary, calling on your own experience and wisdom."
There it was.
"I'll leave first thing tomorrow, sir, unless—"
"That's fine," said Young. "Sleep well tonight. Our prayers go with you in the morning."
Rockwell rose to leave, thinking, It won't be me who needs the prayers.
Chapter 3
March 2, 1858
Rockwell was up an hour before the sun, which showed itself above the Uinta Mountains, east of Salt Lake City, at five minutes past the hour of 7:00 A.M. There was no trick to rising early if you set your mind to it, as any farmer could have told the lazy lay-abeds in town. Rockwell could ride with little or no sleep, and felt that he was downright pampered if he slept five hours in a given night.
By six, still dark, he had been dressed and fed, down at the livery to fetch his Appaloosa gelding, better rested than himself and feeling sassy, from the way it snorted when he put its saddle on. There'd be no pack horse for a simple three-day ride, when he could resupply in Tartarus before the homeward journey. He was carrying sufficient pemmican and corn dodgers to keep his stomach happy on the trail, plus oats to feed the gelding if they came up short of winter grass. Two canteens, just in case, though he expected to find water aplenty in the Stansbury Range, before he crossed the Great Salt Lake Desert. There'd be game, too, if he felt like hunting with the Sharps, but he was more inclined to hold off on the shooting if he could.
Rockwell wasn't concerned with meeting any federals along his route of travel. They'd gone into winter quarters, well east of the capital, for what the newspapers had called an "intermission" in their failed campaign to pacify the Saints. Meanwhile, an emissary out of Washington—one Thomas Leiper Kane of Philadelphia, a Gentile who had nonetheless befriended Mormons, leading a battalion of them in the war with Mexico—had sailed to Panama, then crossed the isthmus on a train and taken ship again to California, before he traveled overland to Salt Lake City for negotiations with the governor. They had been talking for a month, and Rockwell didn't know if they were getting anywhere, but skirmishing had ended when the first snows fell.
No, Rockwell thought. If he was ambushed on the way to Tartarus, it would be Indians. Shoshone, possibly. Maybe the Navajo, or Paiutes. Riding on his own, he'd look like easy pickings to a war party, and that would be their first mistake. Trying to take his hair would be the second, and the last that some of them, at least, would ever make.
Rockwell had nothing against Indians, per se. He understood their troubled history, as outlined on the golden plates that Prophet Smith had translated into the Book of Mormon. Red men were the sons of Laman, a son of the Hebrew prophet Lehi, who sailed to the New World with his brother Nephi, around 600 B.C. Some years after arriving, the two brothers had a bitter falling out, and Laman's followers—the Lamanites—drove their Nephite rivals into the wilderness, later eradicating them entirely. The risen Savior came to offer them his mercy, and while most accepted, after some two centuries they fell back into sin. Disgusted with them, God darkened their skin and cast them into spiritual darkness, leading heathen lives, estranged from Grace.
The Book of Mormon took its title from the name of a Nephite commander, whose son—Moroni, last survivor of the slaughtered tribe—inscribed that history on golden plates, delivered to the hands of Joseph Smith at Manchester, New York, in 1827. Smith, in turn, translated them and published the account in 1830, causing turmoil in the ranks of Gentiles who rejected the amendment to their own New Testament.
Damned fools.
As for the Lamanites of Utah Territory, call them by whatever names they happened to prefer, they had degenerated into savagery. That didn't mean they were immune to reason, necessarily, and some had willingly collaborated with the Saints when they arrived to form the State of Deseret, but farming on the shores of Great Salt Lake required expansion, white men pushing back the red until, at last, they met resistance. Now, with everything from land and water to the native plants contested, it was often perilous for homesteaders and travelers outside of major towns.
It had become a matter of survival.
Rockwell was determined that the Saints would not be modern Nephites, hounded to extinction in the wilderness.
So, he would watch for red men on his way to Tartarus, but it was white men who concerned him more. Utah was not homogenous, in fact, although it had been settled by and for the Saints. Since their arrival, setting an example for success, Gentiles had slipped across the borders and established scattered settlements, mostly in search of gold, silver, or any other
bounty from the earth that would enrich them overnight. They gave no thought to faith or family, only to tunneling for loot and wasting it in sin.
Of course, the governor was fond of gold and silver, too. The strike at Tartarus had seemed a boon from Heaven in its early days, but it had drawn the wrong sort eastward, men who'd tried their luck in California and gone bust, after the forty-niners beat them to the mother lode. From the high Sierras they had drifted, lusting for the next big strike, willing to do whatever might be necessary in pursuit of ore.
Willing to kill?
Of course.
The California gold rush had produced no end of bandits, claim-jumpers, and swindlers, followed in their turn by pimps and harlots, gamblers and saloon keepers. The same trash, doubtless, would be found in Tartarus—which stole its name from the very deepest pit of Hell.
Rockwell had not been there to see his nephew off, when Lehi left for Tartarus with his two wives. Another errand had demanded his attention, following a gang of brigands northward into Oregon Territory, running them to ground at a camp on the Fraser River. His federal badge had given Rockwell the authority he needed to pursue them, and to gun them down when surrender would have made them something less than men.
So they had died, and he had missed his nephew heading west.
Perhaps the last time that he could have seen Lehi alive.
He wasn't counting anybody out, just yet, but if the governor was worried, Rockwell took for granted that there had to be good reason. Brigham Young wasn't given to panic—nor Rockwell to mercy, where threats toward the Saints were concerned.
He hoped there was a simple explanation for the loss of contact with the Mormon colony at Tartarus. If not, he reckoned there'd be hell to pay.
Rockwell wasn't afraid of bloodshed, never had been. Some might say that was a flaw of character, but in his present line of work, he personally viewed it as a necessary trait. Some bad men didn't mind surrendering and spending time locked up, but most, in his experience, resisted the idea. More so, if they were looking at a noose instead of jail time. Why not try your chances in a fight, if it was death, regardless?
Most felons he had known would take a bullet over hanging, any day.
Another reason Rockwell didn't shy from killing was the blood atonement doctrine of his faith. The Book of Mormon was a little hazy on when felons ought to die, and how. In Chapter 24 of Alma, for example, God forgave the Lamanites for "many sins and murders," through the merits of his Son. After the death of Prophet Smith, however, Brigham Young had clarified the matter with an oath of vengeance, added to the Saints' endowment ritual.
In later sermons, Young elaborated on that theme. Boiled down to basics, there were certain sins that God would not forgive, without a spilling of the sinner's blood. Among the Saints, helping a lost soul toward its final exaltation was a gift of love. As Young asked from the pulpit, Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?
At times like this, thinking about his nephew's family in Tartarus, Rockwell was filled to overflowing with that love.
He made good time on his first day out of Salt Lake City, following the lake's shore for the most part, only passing through the northern foothills of the Stansbury Range, where fresh water was easy to find. He met no one along the way, a bonus, since he had no need of company when he was man-hunting. The night was cold, but Rockwell built a good fire, kept the Appaloosa close, his weapons near at hand.
Trail sleeping was a skill lawmen and soldiers learned from grim experience, knowing that if they fell too deeply into dreams, their waking might be brief—a blade across the throat, for instance—or they might not wake at all. When there were enemies about, and that was nearly always, dozing lightly ranked among the top survival skills.
Nothing disturbed his sleep that night, except coyotes howling at the moon, and he was on his own again the next day, as he crossed the desert. Jedediah Smith had lost a member of his party crossing that vast prehistoric lake bed, thirty years before, and it had slowed the Donner Party down enough, in 1846, that they were snowbound crossing the Sierras and reduced to eating human flesh. Rockwell did not intend to cross the worst part of the desert, though he'd done so in the past and lived to tell about it. This time, he was only angling off across its northern quadrant, on his way to Tartarus.
It struck him, even so, that the white wasteland spread before him made a fitting anteroom to Hell.
Millennia gone by, as Rockwell understood it, all that bone-bleached land had lain beneath Lake Bonneville, named for the Frenchman who was first to lay white eyes upon it, back in 1833. The Great Salt Lake and scattered others were the remnants of that inland sea, while most of it—some nineteen thousand square miles, overall—had been reduced to salt and sand.
Despite its blighted history, the desert still supported plant life—tumbleweeds and sego lilies, buckwheat, golden poppies, blue grama and wildflowers in season—with the kinds of animals you would expect in barren places: lizards, scorpions, sidewinders, roadrunners, and the coyotes that were prone to wail by night. None of them troubled Rockwell's sleep, once he had thrown a lariat around his blanket to deter cold-blooded visitors, waking to stoke the fire as necessary through the night.
The trick to getting by in solitude, Rockwell had learned, was living on the inside of his head and being comfortable with his memories. He'd never killed a man who, in his estimation, didn't have it coming. As for him abandoning Luana and the kids, he'd known she couldn't stay the course that lay before him, dealing with the Gentile persecutions, the avenging fallen Saints and hunting outlaws. She was settled now, and Rockwell felt no guilt for anything he'd done.
Sleep wasn't troublesome. He had a nightmare now and then, like anybody else, but woke without remembering its substance. There were no ghosts haunting him—or, if there were, he couldn't see them and they never spoke to him. He'd known Danites who lost their nerve for the gun work, claiming that the dead ones stood before them when they closed their eyes, but Rockwell saw that as a deficit in character. A loss of faith.
Not something he'd been troubled with, so far.
His second night of camping out was much the same, except that he burned tumbleweeds and greasewood through the night, instead of fir and pine. It did the job, but needed frequent tending to preserve a constant flame. Third morning of the trip, he had the Appaloosa loaded and was on his way before the first true light of dawn arrived to warm the desert flats.
And started thinking about Tartarus.
Rockwell had never seen the settlement, but from experience, he knew all mining towns were more or less the same. The ones he'd visited were short on decent women, long on sin, and focused on accumulating riches to the virtual exclusion of all else. Sometimes preachers tried their luck among the avaricious heathens, but they usually didn't last long, either moving on or being sucked into the general corruption that surrounded them.
It would be different, he hoped, with Lehi and the other Saints the governor had sent to mine for silver when the strike was made. Cast in with Gentiles, they were bound to face temptation, ridicule, perhaps abuse—unless they fell in with the pack, that is. Rockwell considered which was worse, corruption or a martyr's fate, and didn't have to think about it very long.
He'd go down fighting, rather than surrender to the call of Mammon, any day.
Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, if he found what he expected in the mining town.
He had his orders: Take whatever action you deem necessary, calling on your own experience and wisdom. Meaning deal with anyone who'd harmed a Saint as he saw fitting.
Blood atonement.
Rockwell knew what he had to do. Search out the law in Tartarus, if there was any to be found, and state his business. Show his badge to settle any argument over authority, and get directions to the Mormon camp. Find Lehi and the rest, if they were still there to be found. And if not, learn what had become of them. Lacking a lawman to interrogate, he'd press the question elsewhere.
> Simple.
Except that towns with dirty secrets had a way of holding onto them. Hunting a fugitive with money on his head was one thing. Anyone might give him up for part of the reward, or just the feeling that they'd done the decent thing. Guilt shared amongst the populace was something else, again. In that case, breaking silence was as good as a confession, bearing retribution home.
And Rockwell was the Reaper.
Probably, his reputation would precede him. That could either help or work against him, all depending on the stories that had found their way to Tartarus. Lawman or executioner? And was there any difference to speak of, in the end?
If he was feared, so much the better. Men might think twice about challenging him, maybe even lying to his face. But if they feared so much that they were dumbstruck ... well, he'd have to find a way to loosen up their tongues.
Third afternoon, an hour past midday, his eyes picked out the blot of Tartarus on the northwest horizon, looming gradually larger as he closed the distance at a walking pace. The Appaloosa had done well, and Rockwell didn't want to punish it unnecessarily. He'd reach the settlement in due time, ample daylight still remaining for the first phase of his task.
He didn't know what to expect beyond trouble, so Rockwell had seen to his weapons that morning, before breaking camp. Both of his Navy Colts were fully loaded, and he carried two spare loaded cylinders to save time, if he used the first twelve rounds. He carried paper cartridges and bullets for his .52-caliber Sharps rifle in a bandolier of pouches, slung across his chest. The Bowie in his boot, for this trip, had been supplemented with a tomahawk, nineteen-inch handle, well balanced for throwing.
Whatever waited for him in the mining town, Rockwell felt he was ready.
And he would be meeting it head-on.
West of the Big River: Boxed Set of Eight Western Novels Page 11